They set up guard shifts, anyway, but further away. Zap turned out to be enough. Half an hour after they left Robert alone, Donal could hear Zap responding to the pirate’s behavior.
“Desist from attempting to escape. Shock in ten … nine … eight … zap.”
There were muttered curses from Robert, and Zap spoke again. “Next shock will be at a higher setting. Please rest and desist before you are injured.”
Donal realized as he settled down to his watch that he hadn’t needed Zap for himself the entire trip. There was so much to do in the moment. He hadn’t had time to get lost in a project when every day was an adventure.
Blot curled up beside him, and Donal listened to the water lapping and dripping, Zap making his rounds, and the pirate grumbling. Life was good.
* * *
Mrs. Clemens volunteered to stay at the camp again, and Donal thought she likely would have insisted if they’d tried to argue with her. He didn’t try; he’d talked to her earlier, while the others were eating, and she knew about the safeguards he’d added.
Amalia was not as easily convinced. “Have you ever killed anyone?” she asked the housekeeper.
Mrs. Clemens shook her head, but not necessarily in denial. “That’s not a thing to be proud of, Your—Amalia, nor necessarily a thing to be ashamed of either. I can do what’s needed. I’d rather that none of you have to make that choice.”
They split up again, this time Chris with Donal and Amalia with Jes. They flipped a coin to see who would get which side, and Jes got the side she and Chris had been on the first time. They set a meeting time of three hours, hoping to get as much seen as possible.
Amalia turned down the night vision goggles, so Chris picked them up. Jes stayed with the magnification goggles, and Donal with the filtered ones. That meant Amalia would carry a torch in her off hand while Jes kept the notes.
Donal and Chris started on the fourth tunnel from the left, which went a satisfying distance back into the base of the caldera. Donal touched the wall frequently, to make sure it wasn’t going too close to active lava.
They finally came to a fork in the wall, with one tunnel going right and the other continuing on straight. They paused to discuss which way to go, and then Donal tilted his head, listening. He gestured to Chris, who listened, too.
“Sounds like one set of footsteps. Hopefully Amalia, with Jes behind and too quiet to hear.”
They waited, Chris with his sword out and ready. In another minute, a glimmer of light shone down the tunnel, and Chris flipped up the night vision goggles. Donal set his to normal vision and took out a spare torch.
Amalia nodded to them as she turned the corner. “So, none of the others go this far back. We may want to check them out, if there’s time, but I have a feeling this is the important one.”
Donal stepped up to light his torch with hers, then handed it over to Chris. “Where’s Jes?”
Amalia whirled around. “She’s so quiet, I didn’t even notice that she wasn’t with me. I’d better go back.”
“No need.” Jes came around the corner, grinning. “The things you can see with these!”
“Come on,” Amalia pointed. “More adventure awaits.”
The walls were no longer cool, but not quite warm. Donal kept one hand on them when he wasn’t mapping their route.
The tunnel slowly changed, looking shaped instead of formed by nature. After a bit, they came to a wider area, with writing on both sides on the walls. Six fingered hands carved from stone pulled back stone curtains. Jes went to examine them while Donal copied down the writing.
“These are real hands. I mean, they were sculpted based on real models. Finger lengths, breadths, scars—each one is unique.”
“That argues against the imagined gods theory,” Amalia commented
Through the carved curtains, the next room had statues that looked like children. There was more writing on the walls, and among the dozens of unique sculptures, Amalia pointed out one that was different.
“Look. This one has five fingers and hair and features that look more … typical.”
“They considered that child the same as the others.” Donal nodded. “Adopted or born to them, that child was theirs, too.”
The walls were getting warmer as they pushed on, and then they stopped. A huge open space was before them, with stairs that led up and across and down again.
The stairs were not anchored to anything. Each hung in the air, separate, impossible.
Jes swallowed. “I don’t like this at all.”
Chris made a weird sound in his throat. “I don’t like this, and I jump out of second story windows into water every day. But I also don’t want to stop.”
Donal looked at it. Reversing gravity was theoretically possible if you could find enough elements that violated all known physical laws. Science changed all the time. Taking a breath, he stepped onto the first step.
The step plummeted down six feet.
“No problem. This is what rope is for.” Amalia pulled out her pack and wrestled out a coil of rope. “I’ll lower myself down to you and help you back up.”
She anchored it around Chris and Jes and then let the rope out slowly through her hands. She reached the step, then grabbed the rope with both hands as the step rose two feet back up.
“I was not expecting that.” She paused, looking at Donal. “What if instead of booby-traps for bad people, they had helpful things for nice people?”
“People who stay together?” Donal guessed. He bit his lip, frowning. “It’s possible. To find out, one of the others would have to come down.”
Jes put one hand over her eyes. “I can do it. And Chris is stronger if we have to be pulled back up.”
Donal remembered that Jes was horribly afraid of heights, but it didn’t seem like a good time to mention it. “Okay, we’ve got you.”
Jes lowered herself down from the edge, and the other two caught her legs and helped her the last bit. As soon as her feet touched, the step came up even with the edge.
“Last chance to be sensible,” Chris said cheerfully. “Oops. There it goes.” He jumped onto the step, which immediately rose to the level of the next step.
“On three?” Donal suggested. “One, two …”
On three, they stepped across together. The step rose immediately to the level of the next, and so on, block by block, until they began going down again. When they got off at last, still together, Jes gave a little sigh.
“I hope the rest of this has anti-booby-traps like this. If they were set up the way Amalia and Donal protect spaces …”
“Oh, I think we’d already be dead by now,” Chris reassured her.
The chamber beyond the floating stairs felt sad to Donal. It seemed silly, but the pictures on the walls seemed to show, not people setting out for something new, but people leaving. There were no children in the picture, and the objects left behind by the people looked somehow forlorn.
“They’re not coming back,” he said, pointing to an object left behind in the picture. It was made of crystal, but it was clearly a sextant. A tool to find your way home.
“Where did they go?” Jes asked. “Why did they leave?”
“I don’t know,” Donal said. “Maybe this wasn’t the right place for them. Maybe they had done what they were here to do.” He looked at the picture again. “I think maybe the children stayed. But not here. Just … closer than wherever the rest went.”
“I don’t suppose we’ll ever know.” Jes sounded as sad as he felt. “It will take lifetimes just to decipher the script you’ve copied down.”
They went on more quietly to the next room, and then Chris let out a war cry that might have been heard back at the skiff. The room was full of baskets of jewels, gold, and strange crystal sheets that weighed almost nothing but were covered with writing.
Donal found intricately carved shapes of the people, some with sea monsters. Amalia found a small disc that hovered in the air without moving. Jes started crying w
hen she found a crystal sheet that had writing in three scripts—Old Dornish, ancient Kuesh, and the script that was on everything else.
The chamber shook with another tremor. Suddenly, there was the smell of sulfur. Donal rested his hand against the wall, and snatched it back, blowing on it. “We’re too close. We need to go back.”
“But … the treasure!”
“You have fifteen minutes to pack up only what you can carry. If the volcano calms down, we might be able to come back for more.”
Jes dumped out her backpack and slid crystal sheets into it, starting with the one in the three languages. Donal took carvings and small paintings, anything that showed the people of these times, but he kept his supplies. Getting back was most important. Amalia grabbed technology, and Donal trusted that she would share when they were safely home. Chris took jewels and gold.
Another tremor hit before their fifteen minutes were up, and Donal raised his hand. “That’s it,” he said. “We’re done.”
No one argued. They raced through the leaving chamber and back to the stairs. Pieces of the ceiling rained down around them as they kept their gait carefully synchronized. Step together, up, step together, up. A rock hit the step they were on, and they grabbed at each other to keep their balance. Another step up, and another, and then down the other side as chunks of rock crashed down beside them. Jes almost teetered backwards as they finally reached the level floor, but they grabbed her, and Amalia took her hand as they ran.
* * *
They ran through the earlier chambers, still dodging falling rock, and Jes cried out as one of the stone curtains broke apart. Chris, in the lead, took the route that he and Donal had traveled from the ship, and the others followed. A tremor shook them, then another, and another.
“We need to get out, all the way out. With this many quakes, the volcano is going to blow, and that could block us all in here.” Donal shook his head. “I should have suggested we leave when we felt the earlier ones.”
Amalia snorted. “We would have talked you out of it. So, we just get Blot and Robert on board and leave. And if there isn’t room for both, I say we take Blot.”
“Mrs. Clemens will be ready to leave when we get there,” Jes reassured him. “She’s wonderful in a crisis. Let me just go ahead and wave to her that we’re coming.”
Amalia took Jes’s pack, and Jes sped away as they carried on in silence. Too soon, she was back.
“We’ve got a problem,” Jes said, catching her breath. “Robert has captured Mrs. Clemens.”
7
“How did he get past Zap?” Donal wondered.
“How did he get the drop on Mrs. Clemens?” Jes countered. “Either he’s got an accomplice, or he’s got a trick we don’t know about.”
“I knew I should have put up more booby-traps!” Amalia grumbled. “He may just steal the skiff and leave us here to die.”
Donal didn’t mention that she’d just proposed doing the same to him. “We’re got to focus on what tricks we have that he doesn’t know about. In the meantime, he’s not going anywhere. I put a lot of safeguards on the skiff before I left. Not only can he not fly it, Mrs. Clemens can’t fly it if we’re not there.”
“Does Mrs. Clemens know that?” Jes demanded.
Donal nodded. “She approved of the idea.”
Jes eased back. “Okay, then. We just need to rescue her, disarm him, get everybody on the skiff, and escape before the volcano erupts.” Another tremor punctuated her assessment. “No pressure.”
“None at all,” Donal agreed. “I’ve got a plan.”
* * *
One of the great things about the alchemical fire extinguisher was that it made a fire blaze brilliantly for about twenty seconds and then go out. That had been easy enough to do back home in the library, but while this was a bigger fire, it would go out just as well if they could just get the extinguisher into it without being seen.
Donal handed Jes two of the black pellets from his pouch. One would do the job, but it wasn’t worth risking failure if she just missed the fire with her first toss. With the fire on the beach the only major source of light in the undersea cavern, the bright light would destroy Robert’s night vision while Amalia and Chris as their two fighters would have the night vison goggles and the low light filtered goggles to put on immediately after. Jes would sneak silently near to the fire to throw in the black pellet, and that would be the signal for the fighters to attack.
Donal would be the bait.
He watched with the far vision goggles until the others were in place and then took a deep breath. I hate conflict. I hate raised voices, even mine. But my friends are counting on me, and I can do this.
He marched directly into the camp so that he stood across the fire from the skiff. “Robert, you snake-bitten peddler of lies, what kind of a father do you claim to be? You abandon me before I’m even born, you lie more easily than you breathe, and now you steal my submersible? You aren’t worthy to be called human. You aren’t even worthy to be called scum.”
Robert came around the side of the skiff, a gun held to Mrs. Clemens’s temple. For one moment Donal was distracted by his appearance. He’d shaved off his beard, or maybe Mrs. Clemens had done it for him, and he looked like a pirate now instead of a prisoner. He looked like someone that a woman—maybe not his mother, but some woman—would notice.
“So, you did get something from me,” Robert chuckled although Donal saw that his eyes were tight. “Your mother wouldn’t lose control of her temper if a cow ate her dress with her in it.” Mrs. Clemens jerked at his grasp despite the gun to her forehead, and Robert swore. “Grace, so help me I will splatter your brains on this beach.”
“You leave my mother out of this, you maggot-infested reject from a dung heap! You aren’t fit to speak her name. You aren’t fit to speak my crew member’s name either. She’s easily worth twenty of you.”
“Hard to argue that,” Robert conceded. “But I’m the one with the gun.”
“How could you?” Donal asked. He sounded angry rather than hurt. To his surprise, he was angry, not hurt.
“Sorry, Donal. Nothing personal.”
“Is that supposed to make it better? Nothing personal?”
Robert was turning his attention from Mrs. Clemens to Donal, just as he’d hoped. Mrs. Clemens, unfortunately, didn’t seem to agree with this part of the plan. She stomped down hard on Robert’s foot and wrenched herself away from him, blocking Robert from Donal … but also blocking Robert’s gaze from the fire. “You want to shoot me, Robert, you go right ahead.”
Robert held the gun out in front of him pointed towards her and snarled. Donal moved quickly to his right, so that the pirate would once again be facing him across the light. “Or you could just shoot me. It couldn’t make you a worse father than you already are.”
Robert made a sound that was like a scream, threw the pistol on the ground, and reached out to Mrs. Clemens with his bare hands.
The fire blazed bright—Jes has great timing—and Robert screamed again, louder. Donal covered his eyes, threw himself to the ground, and called, “Blot!”
The fire burned out, then there was a surprised sound from Robert, followed by a strangled cry. A few moments later, Blot was licking Donal’s face.
It was very, very dark, but he could make out three figures his height standing over a fourth, larger figure on the ground. A tremor struck, and Donal cleared his throat. “Everybody into the skiff. Tie up Robert and bring him if there’s room.” He struggled to his feet. “Come, Blot.”
“Bluh!” the hatchling agreed.
Jes raced in from the darkness while the others followed, dragging Robert between them. He didn’t appear to be conscious, but Donal wasn’t going to spare any worry for him. It took Donal a moment to undo the safeguards he’d put in place, then he slid into the pilot’s seat and put his hand on the thermal reader, letting it verify his identity. He flipped switches up, starting the engine and turning on the lights.
With t
he lights on Donal could confirm that Blot had grown since morning, from the thickness of Donal’s arm to the thickness of his upper leg and twice as long. “Can you curl up, Blot, so we don’t have to kill Robert?”
“There’s less food and more room,” Mrs. Clemens said. “Sorry, Captain. It won’t happen again.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Donal offered.
Mrs. Clemens shook her head. “It completely was. But we’ll talk about that later.”
Zap, battered but fixable, was by his chair. Amalia had dragged in their packs, and everyone except Blot and Robert were properly strapped in. Robert appeared to be regaining consciousness, but it was his concern for Blot that made Donal cautious as he took the skiff back out into the water.
Tremor after tremor shook the cavern, and Donal steered into the first tunnel. The water was choppy, pushing the skiff back and forth and scraping them against the sides. One falling rock dented the skiff as he hurried to follow the tunnel marked JS, and they had to fight a current to enter the tunnel marked AS. They burst out of that tunnel, as the roof of it collapsed, into a larger chamber where falling rocks obscured the markings.
Donal focused his gaze on the markings of the three remaining tunnels. As his view of one tunnel cleared enough to read DL, he moved the skiff to face between the two remaining, focusing just on the visual clues. A larger quake hit, moving the walls of one tunnel further apart so that the DS on one side was finally visible. He took the tunnel even as it began to close again.
“Faster, faster, faster,” Jes chanted, her hand on the console as though on the throttle. Donal turned the skiff sideways through the newly narrowed passage, wincing at Blot’s soft cry.
One more turn into the tunnel marked MS, then a quick adjustment almost straight up, and they were clear. Lava was flowing into the water behind them, and Donal gulped as he saw one stream shower over the tunnel they had just left.
Royal Trouble: The Mysterious Sea Page 4